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I completed my run of Dishonored, high chaos, no rune upgrades. I didn't stick to a no-reloading rule for when I get caught, although I considered it. The thing is, once the alarm does ring and the guards come running, it's pretty easy to squeeze them into a bottleneck and then pick 'em off with the pistol. In those cases I just reloaded the last checkpoint, because it's simply more challenging to complete the level when all the guards aren't piled up dead from gunshots in a single room. The upgrades you get for the pistol make it ridiculously powerful, so much that there were hardly any opportunities to use grenades, springrazors or other gadgets when I did get caught.

I did manage to stick to the no-alarms rule, and I'd try to dispose of guards nonlethally if I had the chance, but my regard for their lives was diminishing more and more, to the point of being in full-on psycho rampage mode in the final mission.

Spoilers: The changes in how the world reacts to high chaos were really interesting. One thing that I noticed in the High Overseer mission is that one of the plague-infected overseers asks his comrades to put him out of his misery during low chaos, while during high chaos he tries to hide it and they murder him of their own accord. It's hard to believe that the changes in the final mission would be so drastic - the conspirators turning on each other - but considering the terror that Corvo brought to Dunwall, and how the plague spread as the streets filled with corpses, I can imagine that the paranoia eventually got to Martin and Pendleton as well. Not Havelock, though. He's a bastard regardless of how many people you kill. I didn't have a lot of options to deal with Havelock since I had no powers, but I'm curious to the tricks you could use to intervene. Sneaking up behind him was just a little bit anticlimactic.

Originally Posted by wrestledwithgod

Planescape: Torment. Scrolling all the way up to my quicksave is getting annoying. Is there any faster way?

Two matches in DotA 2 this morning, two losses. The first match was random picks so I get Pugna, which was someone I never used before. that said, I managed to have some fun with it, trolling spell casters but Silencer and Lina was just a combo I cant really beat. second was frustrating. I loved skywrath mage a lot but this time he I don't seem to be able to wreck enemy teams or stopping a push with him today. plus, my team splits up so often while the other side ganked the shit outta us. nobody sticks together.

at least I had fun being an annoying little troll as Dark Seer yesterday. hella fun

Originally Posted by fiddlesticks

One of the things I love about Deus Ex is how open the whole game is. You're given a lot of freedom when approaching your objectives, which means you can sometimes figure out solutions that not even the developers though of. By contrast, the environments in Human Revolution were a lot more controlled. Scenes like this simply wouldn't be possible in that game.

that's one thing that HR can't top when it comes to gameplay. the first level seems a bit too linear in it. not too many paths. they're all seem to be directed to a certain path rather than branching out. Plus, you can't finish the level without skipping every single guard by bypassing them from another path.

kinda why I think the game is the inverse of the first game as much as Bioshock 1 is to 2.

Playing the Sol Survivor SP campaign. It's kind of an interesting game, let down a little by lack of polish; it doesn't manage to get me quite involved enough. Defense Grid, for example, gives me the feeling that I'm doing something important, but Sol Survivor is a bit flat in that respect, which is a shame.

Also bought the Team Fortress 2 premium gift for a friend last night, so we played a little, 1v1 on empty servers, because I've only ever played against bots, so there's a lot I don't know. It's not a good 1v1 game, obviously, but it was kind of fun anyway, as long as I played the soldier, at least; I got slaughtered when I tried any other class (but at least I pretty much slaughtered my friend when I did play the soldier).

Grand, I have the first book, so I'll buy this at some stage after reading it. I've tried to get into it and it hasn't clicked with me, but if I know there's a good game at the other end maybe it'll be more tempting. Thank you!

Faster than that, I mean. It's nothing major, really, but it does get on my nerves after playing so many RPGs that have a quickload key.

Qwinn's Planescape: Torment Tweak Pack comes with a Quickload button. I strongly recommend installing it anyway, if only for the Banter Accelerator and the fact that it lets you stack rings, bracelets, etc. If you haven't already, you might also consider downloading the PS:T Fixpack, which fixes a ton of bugs still left in the vanilla game and overall makes your playing experience a lot smoother.

Good Old Games (bless their souls) has a very good guide about modding Planescape: Torment as well. It takes a bit of effort to set everything on that list up, but the results are well worth it.

Originally Posted by wrestledwithgod

Speaking of Torment, are there any items I absolutely should not throw away? I'm keeping anything that looks remotely unique and my inventory is beginning to get clogged.

Junk is needed to progress in the game. The cheese can be used in a quest, tough it is optional. There's also a skull you can loot off an enemy that will come in handy later on. Most other items that don't appear to have an immediate use are either vendor trash or completely pointless and can safely be discarded.

That reminds me of Icewind Dale 2. In true infinity engine fashion, you can carry around a lot of trash, including all sorts of dead bodies. Those are quite heavy and serve no purpose. However, towards the end of the game you can resolve a single quest differently depending on just how complete your collection of corpses is.

You flustered the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with your strange passion for carrying around a dead cat. 1000XP
You flustered the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with your twisted good luck charm - and poor attempt at a pun. 1000XP
You flustered the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with disturbing banter between you and your dead woman companion. 1000XP
You flustered the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with a disturbing tale of chaperoning an outing between a dead man and dead woman. 1000XP
You flustered the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with the insane attachment between you, your dead companion, and their dead pet cat. 1000XP
You managed to fluster Yquog with your dead things collection. 1000XP
You managed to *influence* the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, to leave. 1500XP
You managed to fluster the Barghest Whelp, Yquog, with your twisted collection of dead things, to the point of causing him to flee in terror. 2250XP

Qwinn's Planescape: Torment Tweak Pack comes with a Quickload button. I strongly recommend installing it anyway, if only for the Banter Accelerator and the fact that it lets you stack rings, bracelets, etc. If you haven't already, you might also consider downloading the PS:T Fixpack, which fixes a ton of bugs still left in the vanilla game and overall makes your playing experience a lot smoother.

Good Old Games (bless their souls) has a very good guide about modding Planescape: Torment as well. It takes a bit of effort to set everything on that list up, but the results are well worth it.

Junk is needed to progress in the game. The cheese can be used in a quest, tough it is optional. There's also a skull you can loot off an enemy that will come in handy later on. Most other items that don't appear to have an immediate use are either vendor trash or completely pointless and can safely be discarded.

TrackMania 2: Stadium. Excellent TrackMania gameplay; the Stadium is no doubt my favourite setting. Both old and new singleplayer tracks are, with a few exceptions, great. Few moments in even the realistic racing sims come close to getting a perfect line through a series of turns, jumps and loops in TM. That rarely happens until after 20+ failed attempts, of course.

"He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to
the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free". ~ Luke 4:18

I'm a little bit caught with this one in truth. Play wise it's pretty fun and entertaining. I wouldn't of ploughed through it in a few days if it wasn't (I'd say it clocks in around the 25 hour mark for main game and side quests though likely more for completionists). The premise is a smart enough (borrowing heavily from the matrix), the writing astute and funny as the previous games and the voice acting and cut scenes are of the same high standard as those in SR3. However story wise the title is very much reliant on a familiarity with the franchise as a whole. Having played SR2 & SR3 a lot of this made sense to me, but I suspect it would be lost on anyone who hasn't played any of the earlier titles. I'd say SR3 is a must, and SR2 would be beneficial as well, though you'll need to get some mods to make the latter title playable for PC. IdolNinja has an excellent catch all post on the Steam forums here: -

If you're a big saints row fan, then SR4 is more of the same and you're in for a good time, but if you've never played a saints row game before then I recommend getting the others firstly and playing those beforehand.

On the negatives, they made some decisions regarding the female character voice acting that personally I found surprising and slightly perplexing given you can essentially carry through your character from the previous game. The two new voices they've brought in don't really seem to add much and in many ways I think they'd have been better off sticking with the previous voice actresses. Also like SR3 there are still some issues when it comes to character customization especially with respect to clothes. There's plenty of numerical choice, but there's also a lot of sameness. Also they could do with a bit more variation in character builds. It's hard to make an athletic looking female character without them ending up looking like a Bulgarian shotputter at the end of the day. 8/10

To be honest I have no idea, I've never tried applying them mid-game. I couldn't find anything suggesting they mess up your savegame, but if you're not that far in yet it might still be best to play it safe and restart. Alternatively, you could make a copy of all your files in a different folder and then install the mods. If it doesn't work out you can always use your backup.

You don't have to use the mods of course. Planescape is perfectly playable without them. But they really do add a lot to the experience and make one of the best games of all time even better.

For those interested, 97% completion (all story, side and loyalty missions; all clusters, statues, audio logs and text adventures. All events on gold. Just missing the co-op only events) took me 22h according to Steam, 20:03 according to the save game.

Single-Player-wise i'm bouncing back and forth between a couple of things right now, namely:

Papers, Please: It's really quite captivating, but also fairly exhausting, so i usually don't find the patience to play more than 2-3 days per playsession - Also the perfectionist in me keeps wanting to simply start over, now that i no longer feel completely overwhelmed by details to look out for.

Also some Tropico 4 and Endless Space since i picked both up during the Summer Sale.

Alsoalso occasionally alternating between short bursts of Path of Exile with my lvl 80-something HC witch and some Diablo 3 MP10 Paragon farming with my Witch Doctor, since the recent announcement of the expansion reminded me that i still had it installed (Also: Yes, i belong to the minority of people that actually likes both)

Co-op-wise:

Borderlands 2: My coop-buddy and me began our journey through ultimate vault hunter mode yesterday and so far it has been a surprisingly smooth, enjoyable and ridonkulous ride despite us both still using mostly lvl 50 gear at lvl 55-56 (at this point i honestly can't say if we're both still using the Chulainn because it deals great damage or because the ...secondary effect of that weapon makes for great comic relief - i guess it's both.) Scaling-wise it certainly has some issues at higher levels and i honestly doubt that UVHM is all that enjoyable in single-player, but in coop it's a blast and i still simply love this game - Great style, great humor and voice acting. Also the excessive adorability of the Mechromancer never gets old... *doink*